Well, out of the blue I finally decided to stop buying expensive and over-marketed pre-built PCs and I'm planning on building my own. Currently I'm doing the homework involved (which involves three self-help books and generous use of the internet). Right now I'm not so concerned about the physical task of building my PC. I figure between my books (one even comes with a construction DVD) and the manuals that will come with the parts, I'll be well covered. My main concern is getting the most bang for my buck. Keep in mind that my budget for this PC is around $1000, but I'm willing to stretch it as far as $1250, but only if I have to. Under $1000 is preferable, though I'm not sure if it's realistic for my high performance expectations.
That's right. I need help choosing my components. I just
know there are plenty of people with more experience than me on this forum, that have looked at who-knows-how-many different components before building their own monster (which is what I'm probably going to name my baby when I'm finally done, since this is turning into a monster of a pet project).
So far I've only bought the case. It's a LIAN LI Lancool PC-K7B Black Aluminum/ SECC ATX Mid Tower Computer Case. It's got room for three 5.25” and one 3.5" external drives, four 3.5” internal drives, and 7 full size expansion slots. I hope that's enough space. A new case for $70 was hard to pass up, and since I don't trust Ebay, it seemed like an okay deal. I probably could have found a cheaper case, but I couldn't find any good ones that had three or more fans. They were all either small, used, or from websites I didn't really trust. For my uses of being able to upgrade my graphics/audio cards in a few years time and adding more memory, I think it's big enough.
I'm not planning on adding a lot of extra stuff onto my PC, so I figured a mid-size case would be fine. And cheaper. For the most part, I just need room for dual hard-drives and my graphics/audio cards. And wireless/ethernet adapters. The case has two intake fans and one outgoing fan, so I think it should be sufficient cooling for what I'm going to be using it for. I'm not going to be overclocking my graphics card(s) or processors, so hopefully a few air-fans are good and I won't need anything ridiculous like a liquid-cooling system.
The thing I REALLY need help with is figuring out what motherboard and chipsets to use. Most of the online sites I'm looking at seem to have motherboards with integrated chipsets (I
think), but I'm not impressed with the Intel i7/i5 series and so I wanted to get different chipset with a dual- or quad-core processor. Plus I want enough space on the board for a PCI slot, maybe two. I know for sure I want an accelerated graphics card, but should I get a motherboard with an extra PCI slot just in case I want to double it up or add another kind of adapter card? Or is that unnecessary?
I'm not going to be playing Crysis or anything insane like that, but I want enough performance to play games like The Old Republic without losing tons of framerate. I won't be playing on max settings most likely, and most of the time I'll be playing cheap free online shooters, anyway. Like Combat Arms or AVA. My current laptop just isn't built to handle gaming, and it shows.
I'm also not sure how much RAM I need. I was thinking I could go minimalistic with around 2 GB, but I wanted input, because I'm not really sure. I'll be running Windows 7, so I know I'll need an above-average graphics card, but I got no clue what kind of RAM I need, and minimum/recommended system requirements on packaging don't give me an idea of what a gamer would use.
On the hard drive side I thought about using an SATA type, but if I'm making a mistake there and should go with EIDE, please tell me before I go out and buy anything. I'm also not sure what RPM it should be, though honestly I care more about storage space than speed on my hard drive, of all things. I was planning on getting one massive 1TB hard drive, and scrapping the secondary. I'm just afraid that it will be hella expensive to do that.
I just pray to god I'm actually asking the right questions here because as you can tell, I'm a PC noob trying to become something more. I'm not gonna pretend I know how to run more complicated programs like Ubuntu Linux, but I'm getting an idea of how the hardware works and interacts, at least. Needless to say, I got a long ways to go, which is why I only bought the case for the time being.
Just for reference, these were the books I bought myself to help me get started:
I'll take any and all help I can get with my pet project. Input and suggestions to why/why not you would use (or wouldn't use) certain parts would help me greatly. Pros and cons of hardware components are some things I don't feel confident in assessing yet.
I probably missed some stuff here, but if you sat through this huge wall of text you should know that you're already my hero. Thank you.